I worked at Aldi for nearly two years before disability and injury forced me to quit, and take on several non-physical part-time jobs instead. Aldi runs on an extremely robust high-efficiency model that is designed to eke out every ounce of labor every worker has for every minute they are on the clock in order to keep their costs low and the customer’s costs low. In order for Aldi to be profitable, they must be exploitative.
Many Aldi employees will refute this statement because “Aldi pays more than minimum wage!” And yes, they pay just barely enough to be competitive in the local market they are located in – but only if you are comparing them to other grocery stores. The reality of the Aldi model is the job requirements are more in line with working at a warehouse, and warehouses on average pay quite a bit more than grocery stores as the understanding is that it is a difficult physical job.
Many customers also fail to understand how difficult the Aldi job is. The most common complaint we heard as employees was how lazy we were for getting to sit. This quote from querysprout best explains my feeling on that topic, “Letting cashiers sit down – it’s actually not a comfort thing (employees have described the work at Aldi as “backbreaking”), but rather, the company found employees could scan faster if they were seated.” We as customers praise and stand in awe of the Aldi model that allows us to get basic grocery goods for so cheap because they leave the goods in boxes, how revolutionary! In the next breath we complain that there’s never an employee around to ask questions to – the reason being Aldi staffs the bare minimum of employees at any given time to, again, maximize efficiency.
One of the most interesting facets in Aldi’s worker exploitation is how thoroughly prepared they are for worker injury. The job is intensely physical, the training for the physical tasks is minimal, and the expectation for worker speed and production is through the roof. It’s a breeding ground for serious injury, and the reality I knew working there was anyone who worked as a stocker was injured at least once in a year period. If they lasted more than a year, they typically were hurt at least once a year. I knew several people who had worked there for many years and all of them had received reparative surgery, or desperately needed it.
Aldi has a robust worker’s compensation insurance system, and it’s clear that they fork over a lot of cash for it. (I’ve had worker comp claims at other employers that were much less streamlined, in comparison.) Aldi will happily plan for you to be injured, pay for your recovery and for a short time out if needed, and then expects you to be back on the workhorse as soon as possible. Restrictions are heavily discouraged, though they do, of course, abide by them reluctantly when required to.
What happens if you just can’t come back to work right away? Scalia v. Aldi (2012) is an interesting case in which one employee was booted off of worker’s comp for taking too long to heal, and then promptly fired because she hadn’t worked in 12 months. The employee claimed that her firing was retaliatory for her injury on the job. (She didn’t win, which is hardly a surprise in the U.S.) The reasoning behind the decision came down to Aldi’s extensive policies around termination, worker’s comp, and time out, that enough logic loopholes existed in their policies that had existed before this termination to make it “not retaliatory,” though apparently only in a neutral sense.
What does that mean for you as a consumer, and for Aldi? Well, Aldi has absolutely abysmal employee turnover, akin to the rates of fast food industries. They are a ship with a mild leak that has been patched over and over with mixed success, and only time will tell if their model is truly successful in the long run. For you, I recommend asking yourself when you walk into an Aldi: Do the employees actually look happy, or do they look exhausted? Can you even find an employee?
Unruly Bodies 